Charted Territory
by Cutter
Summary: Ginji makes the unordinary into the everyday and vice versa. A short fluffy piece where Ban unexpectedly has some of his territory remapped.


﻿ _**Charted Territory**_

Afterwards, Ban never knows what triggered it, or if there was any trigger at all. It's Ginji, and Ginji is above and beyond the rules of cause and effect.

The day starts out normally and unfolds just like any other. They trot out their posters, try to drum up business, miss a job from Hevn because their cell phone accounts are both suspended and they're busy making unsuccessful sales pitches to the commuters at Shinjuku Station when she comes around looking for them. It starts to rain, and they drag their drenched and penniless asses through the front door of the Honky Tonk just in time to hear Paul say she's gone off to find the monkey trainer and give him the job that should rightfully be theirs.

Ban pounds his fist on the counter, cursing, and Natsumi gives him a cup of pity coffee. He grumbles dourly into his Invincible Man mug and listens with half an ear as Ginji asks her how her day was, how her dog is doing, whether school is going well.

It's just a day like any other day. Part of the long-familiar routine of their lives. Paul is currently denying him Blue Mountain and he has to make do with the house blend until they pay up their tab. The 360 is out of gas again. They're banned from sitting at the counter for scaring away the one customer that's come in all day, which is sheer perversity on Paul's part because the guy was just asking for directions, so it isn't like he was going to buy anything anyway.

Eventually Ginji wheedles pizza out of Paul for dinner. Paul puts it in the oven to bake, wearing the long-suffering expression of someone who's being had for the thousandth time and knows it. Natsumi smiles brightly and cons Ginji into wiping off the tabletops for her. The idiot's a total sucker for anyone with a sweet voice and two X chromosomes. Putty in their hands. It's enough to make a guy totally give up hope for him, sometimes.

Not that the Jagan man himself has been known to blindly agree to anything with a cup size D or above. 'Course not. Insinuations to the contrary are just made out of jealousy, pure and simple.

They sit at a booth in the back, bolting down the pizza as quickly as possible in a sort of protectiveness born of years of friendly food theft. If there's no job, this is the best part of the day. It's warm, it involves cheese, it's got anchovies, and most importantly it's got _calories_, blessed calories, calories that bodies convert to energy and use to perform important tasks like driving and recovery service work and electrocuting people and eating more pizza.

It's in the midst of this complete and utter uneventfulness that he feels it: suddenly there is a light touch on his right hand. Ban looks up, startled and wary. Ginji never stops eating while there's still a slice on the plate, not unless it's really important. The look in his partner's eyes isn't something he can quite place, though, as Ginji gently but firmly tugs his hand so that his arm is lying full across the table. His friend's face is scrunched up, concentrating intently. Then he feels skimming fingers trace the veins of his arms from palm to elbow, so lightly they are hardly there, and his heart is slamming into his ribcage like he's boosted it to nitro and somehow there is no oxygen left in the café.

There's a tiny crackling of electricity at the tips of Ginji's fingers as he explores. It crackles along Ban's nerves and his eyes are riveted to that careful, concentrating face. The fingers move back down to his hand and both of Ginji's hands reach up to grasp it, holding it face-up and softly mapping the palm, ghosting over each of his fingers in turn. His breath hitches and stutters. It's impossible to hear anything, think anything, feel anything with his partner's calloused fingers pressed right over the flesh and bone that houses the Serpent Bearer and touching him like he's breakable when he's really a snake in human form, with skin that if you actually looked at it you could almost see the scales.

And yet his partner, this total basket case he's somehow unwittingly managed to consign the rest of his life to, is looking and touching as if it's something important enough to give up a piece of pizza for.

Taking territory he's spent nearly two decades surveying and casually, effortlessly remapping it, as if nothing could be more everyday.

"What the hell was that about?" Ban asks gruffly when said basket case finally releases his hand. The effect is ruined because he still hasn't been able to draw a full breath. He aims for nonchalant but ends up sounding like someone who's just run a marathon.

Ginji shrugs and smiles. "Dunno. Just curious," he says, as if this explains everything. He plays with Ban's fingers briefly, like a child, and then grins as he swipes the last piece of pizza and shoves it in his mouth.

And it is just like any other day, after all.

Suddenly Ban breathes again. "You jerk! That was mine!" He hooks his right arm around Ginji's neck and administers a violent noogie with his left. "You think you can just rob a man of his dinner like that, you bastard!"

In the background Natsumi is laughing and Paul's voice is telling them to take it outside, and in the more distant background of memory his grandmother is telling him a legend of constellations and gods and curses. But more immediate and present and real than all these things is a man unthinkingly, unknowingly bent on unwinding everything Ban has ever thought about himself, a man who doesn't seem to believe in curses at all, struggling and making gurgling noises and saying "I'm sorry, Ban-chan! I'm sorry! Lemme go!"

Ban grins.

"Not a chance."


End file.
